Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
A number of scientific methods have been developed to destroy, damage, excise, ablate, or otherwise alter biological tissues (e.g., malignant cancerous tumors). The methods include the use of sharpened surgical implements to remove the tissues by cutting, heated surgical implements to remove, ablate, or otherwise damage the tissues by the application of high temperatures, and the application of electrical and/or electromagnetic energies (e.g., RF energy, laser light) directly or indirectly to the tissues to induce changes in the tissues through the application of heat and/or electrical fields, or through other methods.
In some examples, CO2, excimer, Nd:YAG, or other types of lasers are used to direct a high-energy beam of electromagnetic radiation at a tissue to be ablated. The high-energy beam of electromagnetic radiation acts to locally heat the tissue, ablating the tissue. Further, the high-energy beam can be very narrow, enabling the ablation of very small, precisely targeted tissues.